Mr. G’s literalism, like all fundamentalist literalisms, is a curious one. G., for instance, turns a transparent sentence like this: “Israel, like all modern and postmodern nations and settler societies, has inequalities of wealth, income, class, gender, age, and ethnicity”, a statement that quite clearly notes that Israel is not exceptional or unique in any way, into Israel…[alone] has inequalities of wealth, income, class, gender, age, and ethnicity, a statement never made.
Given this mangling of meaning one might wonder whether Mr. G. really is a literalist. He, a critic might argue, did not take the sentence literally, he transformed it into something that it wasn't, so he can’t be a literalist. But while that is true one must remember that scriptural literalists see what they want to see in a text and take what they want to take from a text. Their literalism, in other words, is not necessarily accurate. Their literalism resides not in taking every word of a text literally but in the notion that a text should (a normative reading) be taken literally.
Mr. G. is clearly a nationalist. He has a civic faith, in this instance a belief (a normative reading) in the absolute rightness of Israel. It is his unquestioned nationalist or civic faith, in fact, that leads Mr. G. to mangle the sentence above. Nationalist faith, in other words, over rides textual accuracy in order to demonise its utterer. I shouldn’t have to note that nationalism, as a meaning system, generally has a tenuous relationship to factual accuracy and empirical reality.
Mr. G. may or may not be a misogynist. What he most certainly is, is an ethnocentrist. Misogyny, of course, is a form of ethnocentrism. Mr. G. is an ethnocentrist with an authoritarian complex, a messianic complex, and a voyeuristic habit. G. maintains in one of his posts that he is on a mission, one presumes from god, to combat what he calls “Jew haters”. G., like all of his ideological kin, constructs this “evil” in fictional Manichean terms. “Jew haters”, in his crooked ethnocentric universe mental world, are anyone who says anything he deems “bad” about Israel regardless of whether it is valid or not, regardless of whether it is true or not. Validity and truth, in fact, never become an issue because in Gs ideologically constructed Manichean tautological mental world any criticism of Israel is “bad” and must therefore be “evil”. This Manicheanism justifies, for G and others of his ilk, his liberal use of ad hominems, his illiberal incivility, his red faced emotional hatred, and his rather creepy and freaky voyeurism. One can easily imagine G uncovering and taking part in any of the inquisitorial witch hunts that have periodically haunted human history.
What may seem odd to some is that someone who is likely on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Mr. G. also plays the ain’t I so superior demonisation Manichean game, BBC documentarist Louis Theroux. Theroux’s 2007 BBC 2 documentary, "The Most Hated Family in America", takes us on a trip to a freak show of Theroux’s construction, the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. In his documentary Louis the T. paints a picture for his British audience of yet another scary American cult—Westboro is actually a sect—that holds kooky views—actually Westboro’s condemnation of adultery and homosexuality, its Calvinism, and its apocalypticism are quite common and fairly mainstream in the history of Christianity and the other Mediterranean faiths of Judaism and Islam—and is headed by a weirdo—the now deceased Fred Phelps. At one point Louis the T, in conversation with Shirley, the Phelps daughter who plays a major role in the day-to-day operations of Church, calls Westboro a weird cult. Shirley responds to this demonisation in a way all of us who care about human rights should, she tells him that he doesn’t get to define who or what Westboro is. While Shirley is right to raise the issue about who gets to define an outsider religious group like the Westboro Baptist Church, Louis actually, at least in this case, does have the power to make the characterisaton, even though it is an ethnocentric one, stick. It is he and his BBC colleagues who have edited "The Most Hated Family in America" for near maximum weirdo effect. It is, after all, rather easy to demonise a small group of around 70 members with little political and cultural power. It is Louis characterisation of the Westboro Baptist Church that most watchers will buy into because seeing the other as a freak allows one to think of oneself as "normal".
Mr. G. and Louis the T. have a lot in common. They are arrogant. They are self-righteous. They are my way or the highway type of guys. They are, in other words, pretty typical modern and postmodern individuals.
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